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I also knew that the way forward wasn’t any less complicated, but no one ever promised me less complication. If anything, it’s always going to become more complicated. Better but more. Better and more. –R. Eric Thomas, Here For It

Three years ago, my brother-friend was in Sydney from New York and we decided the timing was perfect to celebrate with Thanksgiving at my house. He brought a friend and I invited some, and we got to work on the food: he did everything, and I did the turkey–my first. It was a breast (that’s what she said). And it was good.

The evening ended in kid tears and an explosion of red wine from my mouth in my bathroom that rendered it worthy of crime-scene status, but overall it was a success. So now, three years later and in a home we own, I thought it would be a good idea to have a couple of friends over and try again. I even set my sights higher (when I couldn’t find a turkey breast at the grocery store) and decided to go whole-hog or, in this case, whole-turkey. I bought the bird and brought it home for a practice run on Saturday.

It did NOT GO WELL. Both of the boys were gagging as I reached inside “the hole” looking for all the crap that’s supposed to be in there, and trying to tie the bitch’s legs together and push the wings underneath it was a comedy of errors that was not funny at all. Finally, I shoved the thing into the oven. After a couple of hours, I found that somebody lied on the packaging because when The Husband cut into it, that bird was. not. done.

All the while, the soundtrack for this endeavour was a party in the backyard of our neighbours’ house (a small, under-20-in-attendance affair because we’re actually trying to not get Covid here) celebrating the daughter’s impending graduation. I saw the twinkle lights and heard the music and I felt a deep, seething hatred for all of it. For all of those young people with their lives and choices ahead of them. For their dearth of responsibilities and their long, untrodden pathways. All while I kept checking on a nasty turkey that would not cook as my children screamed at me to make them stop looking at it and the dog pissed in the corner.

Enjoy it for now, fuckers, I thought as I wiped urine off the floor and shoved a thermometer in some poultry tit.

We threw the turkey out. After drowning my sorrows in a few glasses of red (a theme) and Pride and Prejudice, I slept fitfully among nightmares of turkey. The next morning I panic-texted an American friend, who told me to just order a roasted chicken from a nearby place, and I breathed again. Then I ruefully cleaned toilets as Christmas music played in the background, Mariah attempting to cheer me out of my suburban ennui, this dead-end existence of those whose every dream has come true.

Seriously. They have. I’ve got the husband, the house, the two boys and the dog. We can walk five minutes to the beach. The Long Orange Nightmare is almost over. Life is good! It is also, well, still life.

And there is a lot of life here. There is the turkey breast I ended up finding and cooking last night that smelled and tastes amazing–and there’s the roasting pan I have to clean after. There are the swims I get to have in the ocean every week–and the shoulder pain I’m staving off with physiotherapy. There’s the gloriously unique view of the world from the spectrum–and the resistance to change that comes with it. There’s the moment with the dance teacher before school when she tells me how much joy The Kid brings to her class–and there’s the moment enfolded in it, when Little Brother says hi to her, with a look on his face that is desperate to be acknowledged too (he was).

There was the scarcity of the loaves and fishes to start with, and the twelve extra baskets left over after, and I know I would have been the one wondering why Mr. “Son of God” couldn’t have estimated more accurately because WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO WITH ALL THIS EXTRA FISH WHEN THERE ARE NO BINS ANYWHERE NEARBY?

There is so much. Ugh. There is so much. Wow.

long live our avoidance
of the quadrillion probabilities
of our non-existence

i am not who i was
i am not going to be who i was going to be
you changed all that

you are not who you were
you are not going to be who you were going to be
i changed all that

what is, is… and cannot at the same time, not be.
what was, was… and cannot,
not have been. so you see my love

we are us
we are us now and we shall never have been
not us.

who are we going to be?
we are going to be who we never would have been
without each other.

–Joseph Pintauro